[watmough]

Huh? There's loads of cheap dev kits for a few 10's of bucks on eBay.

Example: http://www.ebay.com/itm/ALTERA-FPGA-Cyslonell-EP2C5T144-Mini...

This uses the EP2C5T144. Some basic getting started info here: http://www.leonheller.com/FPGA/FPGA.html [Leon Heller]

You can run a free copy of Quartus and use it to run Verilog / VHDL cpus, or anything else you want to do.

Same applies to the Xilinx FPGAs.

A really cool example project: http://excamera.com/sphinx/fpga-j1.html